HOW MANY INNOCENT PEOPLE WILL BE MURDERED BY BLACKS TODAY?..........THE LOOTING ACROSS AMERICA is as black as the staggering murder and crime rates of BLACKS ACROSS AMERICA. Black Lives Matter? NO LIFE MATTERS TO BLACKS!

Citigroup chose Obama’s 2008 cabinet, WikiLeaks document reveals

By Tom Eley 15 October 2016

One month before the presidential election of 2008, the giantWall Street bank Citigroup submitted to the Obama campaign a list of its preferred candidates for cabinet positions in an Obama administration. This list corresponds almost exactly to the eventual composition of Barack Obama’s cabinet.

The memorandum, revealed by WikiLeaks in a recent document release from the email account of John Podesta, who currently serves as Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, was written by Michael Froman, who was then an executive with Citigroup and currently serves as US trade representative. The email is dated Oct. 6, 2008 and bears the subject line “Lists.” It went to Podesta a month before he was named chairman of President-Elect Obama’s transition team.

The email was sent at the height of the financial meltdown that erupted after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15. Even as Citigroup and its Wall Street counterparts were dragging the US and world economy into its deepest crisis since the 1930s, they remained, as the email shows, the real power behind the façade of American democracy and its electoral process.

For the highly sensitive position of secretary of the Treasury, three possibilities were presented: Robert Rubin and Rubin’s close disciples Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. Obama chose Geithner, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Geithner, along with Bush Treasury Secretary (and former Goldman Sachs CEO) HenryPaulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, had played the leading role in organizing the Wall Street bailout.

Rubin had served as Treasury secretary in the Bill Clinton administration from 1995 until 1999, when he was succeeded by Summers. In that capacity, Rubin and Summers oversaw the dismantling of the Glass-Steagall Act (1933), which had imposed a legal wall separating commercial banking from investment banking. Immediately after leaving Treasury, Rubin became a top executive at Citigroup, remaining there until 2009.

A notable aspect of the Froman memo is its use of identity politics. Among the Citigroup executive’s lists of proposed hires to Podesta were a “Diversity List” including “African American, Latino and Asian American candidates, broken down by Cabinet/Deputy and Under/Assistant/Deputy Assistant level,” in Froman’s words, and “a similar document on women.” Froman also took diversity into account for his White House cabinet list, “probability-weighting the likelihood of appointing a diverse candidate for each position.” This list concluded with a table breaking down the 31 assignments by race and gender.

Citigroup’s recommendations came just three days after then-President George W. Bush signed into law the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which allocated $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue the largest Wall Street banks. The single biggest beneficiary was Citigroup, which was given $45 billion in cash in the form of a government stock purchase, plus a $306 billion government guarantee to back up its worthless mortgage-related assets.

Then-presidential candidate Obama played a critical political role in shepherding the massively unpopular bank bailout through Congress. The September financial crash convinced decisive sections of the US corporate-financial elite that the Democratic candidate of “hope” and “change” would be better positioned to contain popular opposition to the bailout than his Republican rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona.

As president, Obama not only funneled trillions of dollars to the banks, he saw to it that not a single leading Wall Street executive faced prosecution for the orgy of speculation and swindling that led to the financial collapse and Great Recession, and he personally intervened to block legislation capping executive pay at bailed-out firms.

The same furtive and corrupt process is underway in relation to a Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump administration. Froman’s email is one of many thousands released by WikiLeaks from the account of Podesta. Those communications, such as the Frohman email, which expose who really rules America, have been virtually ignored by the media. The pro-Democratic Party New Republic called attention to it in an article published Friday, but the story has received little if any further coverage.

The media has instead focused on salacious details of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s sexual activities, designed, in part, to divert attention from the substance of the Clinton campaign-related emails being released by WikiLeaks and other sources.

The New Republic drew attention to the Froman memo not because it opposes such machinations, but as a warning to the interests it represents that they must move now to influence the eventual composition of a Hillary Clinton administration.

“If the 2008 Podesta emails are any indication, the next four years of public policy are being hashed out right now, behind closed doors,” wrote New Republic author David Dayen. “And if liberals want to have an impact on that process, waiting until after the election will be too late.”

“The couple parlayed lives
supposedly spent in “public service” into admission into the upper stratosphere
of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of
this vast wealth was a political machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton,
Inc.” This consists essentially of a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure
big business support for the Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their
personal fortunes. The basic components of the operation are lavishly paid
speeches to Wall Street and Fortune 500 audiences, corporate campaign
contributions, and donations to the ostensibly philanthropic Clinton
Foundation.”

“Our entire crony
capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy
approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great
country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THE AMERICAN THINKER.com

KAINE AND CLINTON-OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS…. Has
their golden age of looting America only gotten brighter?

"Between 2009 and 2011,
Kaine served as the head of the Democratic National Committee, the leadership
body of the Democratic Party. He is close to Wall Street, having recently
backed measures to deregulate banks."

WHY OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS WANT MORE OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS

“Clinton has also stepped up her efforts to woo billionaires who
have traditionally supported Republican campaigns on the grounds that she will
be a more effective “commander in chief” and defender of the interests of Wall
Street.”

In another secret speech, Clinton admitted that the policy she advocated with respect to Syria would involve mass killings of civilians. “To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defenses, many of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we’re not putting our pilots at risk—you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians,” she stated.

Secret documents and emails containing these and other revelations were published by Wikileaks and The Intercept in recent days. The latter remarks were revealed as the United States threatens to escalate its military intervention in Syria under the pretext of protecting civilian lives.

In one remarkably Machiavellian speech,

Clinton frankly admitted that she has “both a

public and private position” on certain policy

issues, and that she only reveals the “private

position” when she is engaging in “back room

discussions.” In other words, she consciously

lies to and deceives the public, pursuing an

entirely different agenda in secret

negotiations within the American

establishment.

“If everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least,” Clinton said.

Perhaps one example of this distinction is provided by Clinton’s public and private positions with respect to Syria. While the US State Department uses the pretext of civilian casualties in Syria to ratchet up tensions with Russia, Clinton’s “private position” acknowledges that her own plan will “kill a lot of Syrians.”

Other emails confirm the corrupt ties between the Clinton

campaign and the media, which involve undisclosed

payments to pundits appearing on cable news programs. An

internal list of contemptuously-labeled media “surrogates”

contains those media personalities that could be relied upon

to produce favorable coverage of the campaign.

The list of the “surrogates” deemed “reliable” by the Clinton campaign includes

Rose, George Stephanopolous and others. A similarly incriminating list of “progressive

helpers” includes Judd Legum of ThinkProgress and the “Correct The Record” Super

PAC run by David Brock.

Other documents published by The Intercept reveal secret “off-the-record” cocktail parties held by the Clinton campaign that were attended by journalists from ABC, Bloomberg, CBS, CNN, the Daily Beast, GPG, Huffington Post, MSNBC, NBC, The New Yorker, the New York Times, People, Politico, Vice and Vox.

Invitees of these cocktail parties, where the reporters were briefed on how to present the Clinton campaign to the population in the most favorable light, apparently included Diane Sawyer (ABC), George Stephanopolous (ABC), Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) and Gail Collins ( New York Times ), among many others. The publication of these documents by The Intercept should forever reduce the credibility of these “news organizations” and “journalists” to zero.

The Clinton campaign responded to these revelations with its standard answer to all exposures of corruption and criminality on the part of the Democratic Party or Clinton personally—blame it on Russia. Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin declared that the revelations “removed any reasonable doubt that the Kremlin has weaponized WikiLeaks to meddle in our election and benefit Donald Trump’s candidacy.”

The response of former Democratic Party presidential

contender and so-called “socialist” Bernie Sanders to these

revelations stands out as particularly craven and absurd.

Sanders—who once rallied support based on his

denunciations of the “billionaire class,” but who now

functions as a Clinton campaign sideshow—reaffirmed his

support for Clinton in a statement released Saturday:

“Whatever Secretary Clinton may or may not have said

behind closed doors on Wall Street, I am determined to

implement the agenda of the Democratic Party platform,

which was agreed to by her campaign.”

During the Democratic Party primary elections, Sanders made an issue of the millions

of dollars in “speaking fees” Hillary and Bill Clinton had accumulated, which currently

totals around $153 million. Exposing the fraudulent nature of his entire presidential

bid, Sanders now admits that he will support Clinton no matter what she said or did.

Of course, only the very naive could believe for a moment that the enormous “speaking fees” accumulated by Clinton and her husband were paid for the speeches themselves. Instead, the designation of these sums as “speaking fees” more probably represents what is known in the criminal underworld as money-laundering. In other words, the corrupt flow of cash to the Clintons for services dutifully rendered to the financial aristocracy was disguised as “speaking fees” for taxation and accounting purposes.

In one secret Wall Street speech, Clinton

candidly admitted that she is “far removed”

from the middle-class interests that she has

sought to rally behind her campaign,

reassuring her rich patrons that her lifestyle

and social outlook more closely mirror theirs.

Clinton stated that she is “kind of far removed because the life I’ve lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy, but I haven’t forgotten it.”

In a secret speech at Goldman Sachs on October 24, 2013, Clinton brushed off the conception that rampant corruption, speculation and criminality at Wall Street had led to the economic crash of 2008. Defending Wall Street, Clinton claimed that all this was a “misunderstanding.”

Speaking as though she was an attorney retained to confidentially advise all billionaires regarding their interests, Clinton pointed with concern to the perception “that somehow the game is rigged” as well as the way that hatred of Wall Street was becoming “politicized.”

In the same secret speech to Deutsche Bank on October 7, 2014, Clinton pointed to popular hostility to Wall Street as “a problem for all of us”—using the word “us” to refer to financial aristocrats and their political servants. She reassured the bankers in attendance that any measures or regulations implemented by Congress or the Obama administration would be designed to restore “public trust” in the financial system. In other words, they would be toothless and they would leave the privileges and prerogatives of the financial elite intact.

In her secret speeches, Clinton also reiterated her support forthe Obama administration’s policy that the banks would continue to be allowed to “regulate” themselves. In a secret speech to the Goldman Sachs Alternative Investments Symposium on October 24, 2013, Clinton declared: “The people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.” Translation: “The Obama administration and I will do nothing to halt your illegal practices or impede the flow of the world’s money into your pockets.”

Behind closed doors, Clinton also spoke frankly of her need for vast sums of money to fund her campaign. “I think I raised $250 million or some such enormous amount,” she said, describing her previous presidential bid, “and in the last campaign President Obama raised $1.1 billion.” In that speech, made to General Electric’s Global Leadership Meeting in Boca Raton, Florida on January 6, 2014, Clinton admitted that the US Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision ushered in a “wild west” period of unlimited corporate bribes in elections.

Documents released by The Intercept on Saturday detail the corrupt relations between sections of the media and the Hillary Clinton campaign, with reporters jostling each other to present themselves as the most loyal and reliable outlets for a calculated “leak” of exclusive information. “One January 2015 strategy document,” reported The Intercept, “singled out reporter Maggie Haberman, then of Politico, now covering the election for the New York Times, as a ‘friendly journalist’ who has ‘teed up’ stories for them in the past and ‘never disappointed’ them.”

The emails released over recent days appear to bolster allegations in a lawsuit filed Thursday by the campaign finance watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, which claims that the Clinton campaign flouted federal election law by coordinating activity with a “super PAC” run by David Brock, which contributed $6 million to the Clinton campaign. The allegations are serious and have the potential to trigger criminal prosecutions.

In an internal Clinton campaign email released by Wikileaks, Research Director Tony Carrk urged staff to “give an extra scrub” to the transcripts of Wall Street speeches before any portions could be publicly released.

September 21, 2016. San Francisco, CA (ONN) By all accounts, Wells Fargo has been perpetrating the crime of the century. Some have called it the largest illegal scam in history. Over the past five years, at least two million crimes were committed by 5,300 employees of Wells Fargo bank. The Obama administration has retained its perfect record of protecting bankers from criminal prosecution, settling like always for a large cash payment to the same Executive Branch that refuses to prosecute.

Not a single conviction in 8 years!

There’s a reason why most bank executives, while being longtime Republicans, are supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton for President. We’d be speculating if we revealed their reasons. But this week’s bombshell that Wells Fargo bank perpetrated the largest crime in American history and the Obama administration has continued its longstanding policy of not bringing a single offender to justice, suggests there’s more to the cozy relationship between criminal banks and Democratic Party leaders like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

It took a Senate Committee hearing yesterday in which Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf was crucified by Democrat and Republican Senators alike, for the American people to find out just how big and widespread the five-year crime spree at Wells Fargo was. The LA Times exposed the fraud three years ago with California prosecutors conceding the crime was too large and too widespread for its limited capabilities to prosecute, opting instead for a cash payment from the bank. But the Obama Justice Dept is accused of refusing to investigate the largest crime in history until only days ago.

The crime of the century

As revealed in the Senate Committee hearing yesterday, the details of the Wells Fargo fraud perpetrated on the American people are mind-blowing. As one US Senator put it, the number of victims of this latest fraud is more than double the whole population of his entire state.

5,300 Wells Fargo employees were identified and fired for opening over 2 million bank accounts for their customers without the customers’ knowledge. A separate US Senator said his office was flooded with calls from outraged small, local bank executives in his state who insisted that if they or their employees stole money from their customers’ accounts, forged customers’ signatures to open new accounts, and then stole even more money from the new accounts in the form of fees and fines - they’d all be in jail.

But the Obama Justice Department, as well as a host of Executive Branch regulatory agencies, has continued its policy of protecting individual perpetrators from criminal prosecution opting instead for cash payments from shareholders to the Obama administration. In this case, Wells Fargo was ordered to pay a $185 million fine to the government. That amount pales in comparison to the $5 billion in profits the bank pockets every quarter.

Crime does pay

In grilling the Wells Fargo CEO yesterday, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) accused him of personally pocketing millions of dollars from the scam. The bank executive who oversaw the criminal activity – Carrie Tolstedt – has announced she is leaving the bank, and she’s leaving with a cash payout of $124 million.

Outraged critics of the Obama administration’s handling of recurring crimes perpetrated by giant Wall Street banks point out that they also happen to be some of his and Hillary Clinton’s largest financial contributors. They repeatedly point out that not a single person has been brought to justice for any crime committed by any of the big banks since Barack Obama took office.

They point to the economic collapse of 2008-2009. They point to the robo-signing scam in which over 1 million American families and businesses had their homes and property stolen by Bank of America and Wells Fargo, only to have the Obama Justice Dept settle for a payment of a few thousand dollars to each victim instead of the return of their homes. They point to illegal money laundering for Iran by Standard Chartered and illegal money laundering for Mexican drug cartels by HSBC. JP Morgan Chase has been convicted multiple times both criminally and civilly. But in every case, not a single person ever went to jail.

Critics of the Democrat administration also point out that under Republican administrations, hundreds of criminal bankers were put in jail. They also point to the imprisonment of Worldcom’s executives, and Enron’s executives, and a host of others. Under Democrats, they argue, not a single banker has gone to prison. In fact, in 2008 after the economic collapse banks were deemed “too big to fail, too big to jail”. But under President Obama, they’ve gotten even bigger, and obviously still too big to jail.

Clinton and Obama silent

One Senator summed up the unified outrage by all Americans yesterday when he said Wells Fargo had managed to do something that has never happened in his entire political career – uniting Senators from both parties in their outrage at the fraud committed, and the Obama administration’s refusal to prosecute it.

And while big named Democrats from this year’s Presidential campaign like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have publicly condemned the fraud, other Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have remained ominously silent.

“You squeezed your employees to the breaking point so they would cheat customers and you could drive up the value of your stock and put hundreds of millions of dollars in your own pocket,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren told the Wells Fargo CEO yesterday, “You should resign. You should give back the money you took while the scam was going on.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders was also outspoken in his condemnation. “Let’s be clear, the business model of Wall Street is fraud,” he said yesterday, “There is no better example than the recently-exposed illegal behavior at Wells Fargo.”

For her part, Hillary Clinton also made a public statement in the form of an open letter to Wells Fargo customers. But instead of condemning the activity as unpunished crime like all of her counterparts have, Clinton excused the fraud as accidental mismanagement due to the enormous size of the nation’s largest bank. “We need to make sure that no financial institution is too big to manage,” Clinton told Wells Fargo customers, “And if any bank can’t be managed effectively, it should be broken up.”

Senate hearings on the Wells Fargo fraud will continue, with Senators turning their attention to federal regulators who turned a blind eye, bank auditors and risk managers who had to know about the scam, and the independent accounting firm that signed-off on the criminal activity.

The Bill Clinton

administration was

so pro-Wall Street

that it was accused

by many of being

responsible for the

global economic

collapse of 2007-

2008.

January 2, 2014

Hillary Clinton aligns with Wall Street for 2016

By Mark Wachtler

January 2, 2014. Manhattan. (ONN) When Goldman Sachs invites you to a party, you go, especially if you have your sights set on a Presidential run in 2016. And that’s exactly what Hillary Clinton did two weeks ago. Speaking to the exclusive crowd of millionaires and billionaires, the former Secretary of State let them know in no uncertain terms that another Clinton White House would once again be on Wall Street’s side in America’s culture war.

Hillary Clinton is positioning to be Wall Street's preferred candidate in 2016. Image courtesy of Flickr.

Subscribe to Whiteout Press. It's FREE and you can unsubscribe at any time. Just 6 emails per month.

Most people assume that the notorious 1%-ers, those elite billionaire barons of Wall Street, are all Republicans. But the truth is, in 2008 America’s super-rich abandoned the GOP and its candidate John McCain and overwhelmingly supported Democrat Barack Obama. Campaign donations from the five largest Wall Street banks exponentially favored the Democrat. That changed in 2012 when they switched back to the Republican Party and one of their own – Mitt Romney. But both times they were burned. Now, they long for the good old days of the Clinton and Bush administrations where they were given free reign to do almost anything they wanted.

Goldman’s get-together

Two weeks ago at the luxurious Conrad Hotel in lower Manhattan, some of the world’s richest and most powerful people got together for what seemed at times like a political rally. Prospective 2016 Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton even reportedly took home no less than $200,000 as her minimum speaking fee. By her side giving his own six-figure keynote speech to the gathered Wall Street elite was her husband and former President Bill Clinton.

After being introduced by Goldman Sachs executive Tim O’Neill, Hillary Clinton went on to reassure the crowd of bankers and wealthy investors that a Clinton administration wouldn’t hold Wall Street responsible for the nation’s economic ills the way the current Obama administration has. Illustrating the two hypocritical faces of the Obama White House, the bankers love his policy of giving them trillions in free money. But they don’t like being called “fat cats” by the President at the same time.

According to a report from Politico which interviewed guests at the high profile event, Hillary Clinton insisted that all Americans were to blame for the country’s ever-growing economic failings over the past three decades, not just Wall Street as many from both of America’s two establishment parties contend. Bank-bashing, she told them, was counter-productive and needed to stop.

Impressions from the event

After speaking to a number of attendees, the report goes on to quote or paraphrase their reactions to Clinton’s speech. One pleasantly surprised Wall Street insider told the publication, “It was like, here’s someone who doesn’t want to vilify us but wants to get business back in the game. Like, maybe here’s someone who can lead us out of the wilderness.”

Hillary Clinton is no stranger to Wall Street’s richest and most powerful insiders. As first lady, a US Senator, Presidential candidate, and then Secretary of State, she has literally spent decades courting them for political contributions and watching many of them grow up from their first years out of college to their positions at the helms of the wealthiest corporations on Earth. And she’s been a vocal and loyal supporter of Wall Street the entire time.

The Bill Clinton administration was so pro-Wall Street that it was accused by many of being responsible for the global economic collapse of 2007-2008. Clinton removed the barrier between investment banks and commercial banks, allowing all of them to take citizen deposits and then gamble them in the casino-like financial markets. He also incentivized them to increase home loans, even to those who didn’t qualify, in an attempt to put as many Americans as possible into their own home.

With rank and file Tea Party Republicans shunning Wall Street and the bottom half of the Democratic Party rallying around corruption-busters like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), one attendee at the Goldman Sachs event who is also a major Republican donor told Politico, “The ground is shifting beneath their feet.” He was speaking of the political clout Wall Street has lost to movements like Occupy and individual power-players such as billionaire Sheldon Adelson who single-handedly used his own vast fortune to affect the Republican nominating process.

Ironically, as the American people feel increasingly betrayed by both Democrats and Republicans in favor of Wall Street, leaders on Wall Street feel betrayed by the same two parties who feel Washington has sided with the American people at their expense. As one attendee put it, “Like the rest of America, Wall Street is looking at Washington and saying whether we agree or disagree, they’re looking at both parties with complete revulsion.”

Obama double-cross

One repeating theme at the Goldman Sachs Manhattan event with the Clintons was the impression by Wall Street power-brokers that they were betrayed by President Obama. They describe how they went out on a limb to get him elected President, both publicly and financially, and he betrayed them. Most describe how the animosity dates all the way back to the opening days of the first Obama administration in 2009.

At the time, credit had disappeared, Lehman Brothers was forced out of business by the government, unemployment skyrocketed, and panic had spread across most of America and the world. Wall Street’s first demand from the new President was that his Democratic administration continue the Bush/Republican policy of bailing out irresponsible and criminal banks with trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. Obama was happy to oblige.

At the same time it was bailing out Wall Street, the Obama administration was making other small changes that rubbed the global banking community the wrong way. The first slight to them was the appointment of Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff. Emanuel had made millions working on Wall Street over the previous three years through his political connections, but knew next to nothing about how banking worked. His well-reported promise to ‘not let a crisis go to waste’ was seen as the first shot against the banks.

“I knew right at that moment, standing in Rahm’s office, that they did not really have any interest in understanding Wall Street or working with us in any significant way,” one CEO told the publication. Federal Reserve and Treasury veteran Timothy Geithner seemed to be the only pro-Wall Street person in the Obama administration. Their impression was confirmed when the President named his White House liaison to Wall Street. Unlike Bill Clinton who picked former Goldman Sachs CEO Robert Rubin, Clinton chose longtime neighborhood friend Valerie Jarrett.

Wall Street executives interviewed by Politico for their report describe how Jarrett knew next to nothing about finance and only cared about dictating Obama’s agenda. One pro-Obama banking executive active in Democratic Party circles was blunt when describing Valerie Jarrett and her work at the White House. “Valerie immediately designated herself as business liaison in the White House, and there is no one I know who respects her as a businessperson or thinks she knows anything about business.” And that’s from one of their own Wall Street supporters.

While the leaders of both the Republicans and Democrats are in Wall Street’s pockets, and as President Obama continues to play both sides against each other, America’s Main St. citizens continue to mobilize against the country’s financial oligarchy. Whether it’s the Tea Party on the right or Senator Elizabeth Warren and her army of corruption-busters on the left, Wall Street is feeling the heat. And depending on who the GOP nominates for President in 2016, Hillary Clinton is looking more and more like Wall Street’s candidate.

"But the
Clintons personify this corruption just as much as Trump, even if they made use
of a different mechanism and on a somewhat smaller scale. They amassed a
fortune exceeding $150 million in the decade after Bill Clinton left the White
House, mainly through six-figure fees for addressing corporate and Wall Street
audiences. Barack Obama will shortly take a similar path, reaping his reward
from the financial aristocracy whose interests he safeguarded so assiduously
over the past eight years."

"On Saturday, WikiLeaks published the

transcripts of three lavishly paid speeches given by Clinton at gatherings held by Goldman Sachs, dating from June 4, October 24 and October 29, 2013. All three feature a mix of groveling before the financial malefactors who hired her to speak and gloating over her own wealth."

OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS TO SERVE THE SUPER RICH:

The slow and painful death of America that dominates American society."

By Tom Carter 17 October 2016

In one question-and-answer session on October 24, 2013 at Goldman Sachs, with CEO Lloyd Blankfein in attendance, an audience member asked the current Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton the following question: “And Mike Bloomberg had 30 billion other reasons than to take office. Do we need a wholesale change in Washington that has more to do with people that don’t need the job than have the job?”

Clinton’s answer was revealing. “That’s a really interesting question,” she said. “You know, I would like to see more successful business people run for office. I really would like to see that because I do think, you know, you don’t have to have 30 billion, but you have a certain level of freedom. And there’s that memorable phrase from a former member of the Senate: You can be maybe rented, but never bought. And I think it’s important to have people with those experiences.”

Clinton’s response is an open defense of the aristocratic principle: the rich should rule. By virtue of being very wealthy, the rich have the leisure time to pursue a political career. Moreover, they supposedly have immunity from being bribed, since they are already so wealthy. Finally, they have the “experience in business” necessary to preside over a social system that benefits the social layer which appropriates all the profits from business and finance. These are sentiments that any 18th or 19th century aristocrat would recognize and embrace.

Clinton merely echoes, in a more crude form, the patrician arrogance of Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830-1903), whose views were summed up by historian Barbara Tuchman:

He did not believe in political equality. There was the multitude, he said, and there were the “natural” leaders. “Always wealth, in some countries birth, and in all countries intellectual power and culture mark out the man to whom, in a healthy state of feeling, a community looks to undertake its government.” These men had the leisure for it and the fortune, “so that the struggles for ambition are not defiled by the taint of sordid greed… They are the aristocracy of a country in the original and best sense of the word… The important point is that the rulers of a country should be taken from among them,” and as a class they should retain that “political preponderance to which they have every right that superior fitness can confer.”

Clinton’s argument that her own wealth entitles her to govern America is an argument also made repeatedly by Donald Trump, who touts his own billions as a reason he will remain immune to “special interests.”

The “former member of the Senate” to whom Clinton was apparently referring was John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat who held office from 1987 to 2005. Considered one of the most conservative Democrats ever to take office, Clinton’s role model went on to pursue a lucrative lobbying career at the firm Squire Patton Boggs. His name is synonymous with Washington’s corrupt “revolving door.”

"On Saturday, WikiLeaks published the transcripts of three lavishly paid speeches given by Clinton at gatherings held by Goldman Sachs, dating from June 4, October 24 and October 29, 2013. All three feature a mix of groveling before the financial malefactors who hired her to speak and gloating over her own wealth."

In one of her secret Wall Street speeches, Clinton frankly admitted that she has a “public position” and a “private position.” The private position is expressed in “backroom discussions,” while the “public position” consists of the lies she tells to the rest of the population.

The fact that Clinton addressed the notorious investment bank in the first place highlights the extent to which the American corporate, financial and political establishment is drenched in corruption and criminality. In April 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report entitled “Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse.” This report exhaustively documented that the financial crash of 2008 and the recession that followed were the product of fraud and illegality on the part of mortgage lenders and banks such as Goldman Sachs, with government regulatory bodies as well as credit rating agencies serving as accessories.

Forty percent of the 639-page report, or some 240 pages, were devoted to the fraudulent and deceptive practices of Goldman Sachs. The report presented documents, emails, internal communications and other evidence showing that the largest US investment bank had sold billions of dollars in subprime mortgage-backed securities to investors, vouching for their value, even as it was betting that the investments would fail. Goldman made billions and CEO Blankfein and other top executives pocketed millions in bonuses by accelerating the collapse of the financial system.

Michigan Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate subcommittee, famously described how the investigation had uncovered “a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing.”

“Using their own words in documents subpoenaed by the subcommittee,” Levin said, “the report discloses how financial firms deliberately took advantage of their clients and investors, how credit rating agencies assigned AAA ratings to high-risk securities, and how regulators sat on their hands instead of reining in the unsafe and unsound practices all around them. Rampant conflicts of interest are the threads that run through every chapter of this sordid story.”

So when Clinton was hobnobbing with Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein in 2013, while investigations of wrongdoing by Goldman and the other Wall Street banks were still ongoing, she was consorting with a man who belonged in prison. In 2011, Levin had recommended that the Justice Department criminally prosecute Blankfein for his fraudulent and deceptive conduct, and the Senate subcommittee charged that he had perjured himself in testimony in 2010 regarding his bank’s role in the financial crash. Nevertheless, no charges were brought, and in 2013 Clinton was accepting upwards of $225,000 per speech from Blankfein’s firm.

Hillary and Bill Clinton have accumulated a total of $153 million in speaking fees since Bill Clinton left the White House. Only the very naive could believe that these vast sums were paid for the speeches themselves. They were payment for services rendered to the American financial aristocracy over a protracted period.

Clinton’s Wall Street speeches deserve to be widely read. They provide an invaluable first-hand education in the sheer cynicism of the American ruling class. While the Obama administration publicly insisted that the Dodd-Frank reforms of 2010 were “strict regulations” that would ensure that the 2008 crash would “never happen again,” Clinton privately told her Goldman audience not to worry, that these cosmetic reforms had to be passed for “political reasons,” to provide the appearance that the government did not “sit idly by and do nothing” as people lost their jobs, homes and life savings.

When Blankfein snidely asked Clinton how, should he decide to run for president, he should conduct his campaign, Clinton responded with her own cynical joke. “I think you would leave Goldman Sachs and start running a soup kitchen somewhere,” Clinton replied, to the merriment of the assembled guests.

The response to the publication of these speeches by so-called “socialist” Bernie Sanders exposes the utterly fraudulent character of his entire presidential bid. While he postured during the Democratic Party primaries as a proponent of a “political revolution” against the “billionaire class,” Sanders now functions shamelessly as a sideshow for the Clinton campaign, browbeating his (now much smaller) audiences with admonitions to vote for the preferred candidate of the “billionaire class” he claimed to oppose.

During his run for the Democratic nomination, Sanders repeatedly called on Clinton to release the transcripts of her Wall Street speeches, which she refused to do. He charged that the speeches would show her subservience to the bankers. Now, transcripts have been leaked to the public, completely substantiating his accusations. His silence only underscores the depth of his political treachery and dishonesty.

Meanwhile, emails published by WikiLeaks to and from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, reveal the consummate cynicism with which Hillary Clinton sought to portray herself as a champion of “everyday Americans,” small businesses, unionized workers, minorities and women. Having no connection whatsoever to any popular movement or any policies that have benefited the bottom 90 percent of American society, Clinton relies on a network of “community leaders,” union bureaucrats, academics, celebrities and media “surrogates,” who use empty demagogy and identity politics to market her brand to voters.

In one particularly Machiavellian email, one of Clinton’s aides discussed adding a “riff” of demagogic statements against Wall Street in a speech to Deutsche Bank in 2015, “precisely for the purpose of having something we could show people if ever asked what she was saying behind closed doors for two years to all those fat cats.”

“I wrote her a long riff about economic fairness and how the financial industry has lost its way,” the aide wrote. “Perhaps at some point there will be value in sharing this with a reporter and getting a story written. Upside would be that when people say she’s too close to Wall Street and has taken too much money from bankers, we can point to evidence that she wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power.”

In another email, Podesta frankly noted that Clinton hated the phrase “everyday Americans,” but Podesta urged her to use it anyway. “I know she has begun to hate everyday Americans, but I think we should use it once the first time she says I’m running for president because you and everyday Americans need a champion,” Podesta wrote.

The cynicism of Clinton’s campaign knows no bounds. Her staff actually worked to help Donald Trump secure the Republican nomination, believing that Clinton would have a better chance of defeating Trump in the election than a more conventional Republican candidate. The media was encouraged to “take him seriously,” and Clinton was urged to single Trump out for criticism in order to “help him cement his front runner status” among the Republican primary candidates.

Around 11,000 out of 50,000 emails obtained by WikiLeaks have been published. The Clinton campaign’s response to these exposures has been to blame Russia, in line with the Obama administration’s campaign of saber-rattling against the Putin administration. In an interview last weekend on Fox News, Podesta suggested that the emails were not authentic, while simultaneously (and inconsistently) arguing that the emails were acquired by “the Russians,” who are supposedly attempting to deliver the election to Donald Trump.

On Friday, Podesta taunted WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange with a picture of a number of uniformed chefs preparing a luxurious private dinner for the Hillary Victory Fund. “I bet the lobster risotto is better than the food at the Ecuadorian Embassy,” Podesta wrote as the caption to the photograph on Twitter, referring to the fact that Assange has been a de facto prisoner at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since he sought asylum there in June 2012. Assange immediately replied, “Yes, we get it. The elite eat better than the peasants they abuse.”